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1. Frances K. Pohl, Ben Shahn (San Francisco: Pomegranate
Artbooks, 1993), 10.
2. Walker Evans. Quoted in Morris Dorsky, “The Formative Years
of Ben Shahn: The Origin and Development of His Style” (MA
Thesis, Institution of Fine Art, New York University, 1966), 49.
3. Pohl, 8.
4. Evans observed of Shahn that he was “a Brooklyn boy who
didn’t want to be a lithographer.” Quoted in Dorsky, 48.
5. In 1925 and from 1927 to 1929 he traveled in Europe and North
Africa.
6. Ben Shahn, Interview by Dorsky, October 7, 1951. In Dorsky, 9.
7. Quoted in Dorsky, Ibid.
8. Dorsky, Ibid.
9. John Szarkowski, Introduction in Walker Evans, Walker Evans (New
York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1971), 9.
10. Berlinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1995), 35-6.
11. Pohl, 10.
12. Walker Evans, Walker Evans at Work (New York: Harper & Row,
Publishers 1982), 24.
13. Quoted in Walker Evans at Work, 70.
14. Dorsky, 45.
15. Rathbone, 54; Bernarda Bryson Shahn recalled, “When I first
knew Shahn in 1933, they had two studios in the old house at Bethune
Street and a lot of people were coming and going.” Bernarda
Bryson Shahn, interview by the author, Roosevelt, New Jersey, October
21, 1996.
16. Rathbone, 54.
17. Ibid.
18. Bernarda Bryson Shahn, interview by the author, Roosevelt, New
Jersey, October 21, 1996.
19. Twelve of Shahn’s photographs were published in the November
1934 issue of New Theater magazine in a photo essay titled, “The
Theatre of New York.” Susan Edwards, “Ben Shahn: A New
Deal Photographer In The Old South” (Ph.D. diss., The Graduate
Center, The City University of New York, 1996), 35.
20. Ibid, 38.
21. John D. Morse, ed. Ben Shahn (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972),
135.
22. Rathbone observed that the portrait in watercolor was done in
the summer of 1930, although both portraits were dated 1931 in the
books by Bernarda Bryson Shahn and Frances K. Pohl. Rathbone, 55;
Mrs. Shahn herself was not sure about the exact date of the portraits
yet she believed that the watercolor portrait was painted later
than the oil portrait. Bernarda Bryson Shahn, interview by the author,
Ibid.
23. Shahn stated about portraiture: “The first problem having
to do with likeness in portraiture is that of whether one is primarily
a portrait painter, or whether he is primarily a painter, as such.
I have a notion that the principal difficulty facing the professional
portrait painter is one of personalities. Indeed, every sitter for
a portrait has a thousand faces, and the one that he wants to see
appear on the canvas is his most comely face—probably imaginary,
at that. If his portraitist is inclined to candor, the sitter may
be deeply grieved; he may, I am sure that he often does, reject
the work on the ground that it does not resemble him. Ben Shahn,
“Concerning ‘Likeness’ in Portraiture.” Quoted
in Morse, 88.
24. Bernarda Bryson Shahn, interview by the author, Ibid.
25. Quoted in Pohl, 10.
26. Rathbone, 55.
27. Quoted in Dorsky, 49.
28. Quoted in Walker Evans at Work, 42.
29. However, Shahn’s increasing interest in the lives of ordinary
people in the late thirties had more to do with his career as an
active documentary photographer for the Resettlement Administration/Farm
Security Administration in 1935 and ‘36. In the fall of 1935,
under government patronage, Shahn took a three-month trip to photograph
the rural South. Through this trip, he was drawn to the folk culture
of ordinary people, a change “from a social realist to a personal
realist.” Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1957), 40.
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